Two (or more) computers sharing workload

[Caffiend]

I've been fooling around with large numbers for a little while, and seeing how slow my laptop is calculating prime numbers above 10^8, have been wishing I had a dedicated machine to crunch numbers... If I have the concept somewhat right, supercomputers essentially are clusters of CPUs on purpose-made motherboards all linked together to share workload. Obviously such a machine is out of the question, but I do know that there are dual-processor motherbaords available to consumers. Forgetting about that option, would it be possible to have two or more desktops running together and sharing workload? Or even one sort of main computer with all the bells and whistles, linked with several units that are pretty much just a motherboard and power supply? Or am I just talking stupid?

[bartonc]

I've been fooling around with large numbers for a little while, and seeing how slow my laptop is calculating prime numbers above 10^8, have been wishing I had a dedicated machine to crunch numbers... If I have the concept somewhat right, supercomputers essentially are clusters of CPUs on purpose-made motherboards all linked together to share workload. Obviously such a machine is out of the question, but I do know that there are dual-processor motherbaords available to consumers. Forgetting about that option, would it be possible to have two or more desktops running together and sharing workload? Or even one sort of main computer with all the bells and whistles, linked with several units that are pretty much just a motherboard and power supply? Or am I just talking stupid?

I think that it's fesible and maybe not totally impractical. For high speed computation, one problem is the "bottleneck" created at the network level. But if you have a very long-running process, offloading to a secondary machine starts to look attractive. It wouldn't take much to have one piece of software listening for commands/data, acting on those commands, notifying the sender of completion and returning requested data. I don't, however, know of anything like this for Windows (pardon the assumption). I'd contribute my old Celeron 0.666 GHz machine to the effort, though.

[r035198x]

I think that it\'s fesible and maybe not totally impractical. For high speed computation, one problem is the \"bottleneck\" created at the network level. But if you have a very long-running process, offloading to a secondary machine starts to look attractive. It wouldn\'t take much to have one piece of software listening for commands/data, acting on those commands, notifying the sender of completion and returning requested data. I don\'t, however, know of anything like this for Windows (pardon the assumption). I\'d contribute my old Celeron 0.666 GHz machine to the effort, though.

Hey, is there anything wrong with that Celeron of yours?

[Motoma]

Hey, is there anything wrong with that Celeron of yours?

Aside from being a 666MHz?

[bartonc]

Hey, is there anything wrong with that Celeron of yours?

Aside from being a 666MHz?

It's the same one that I offered to you a few weeks ago. Back then the only thing wrong was that it is on the Western edge of the US at this moment.

[r035198x]

It's the same one that I offered to you a few weeks ago. Back then the only thing wrong was that it is on the Western edge of the US at this moment.

You seem like you really want to give it away somehow.

[bartonc]

You seem like you really want to give it away somehow.

Yep. It's up for grabs.

[Killer42]

Yep. It's up for grabs.

I'm not surprised you're trying to unload it on someone. Check that speed rating - it's evil, I tell you!

[horace1]

I've been fooling around with large numbers for a little while, and seeing how slow my laptop is calculating prime numbers above 10^8, have been wishing I had a dedicated machine to crunch numbers... If I have the concept somewhat right, supercomputers essentially are clusters of CPUs on purpose-made motherboards all linked together to share workload. Obviously such a machine is out of the question, but I do know that there are dual-processor motherbaords available to consumers. Forgetting about that option, would it be possible to have two or more desktops running together and sharing workload? Or even one sort of main computer with all the bells and whistles, linked with several units that are pretty much just a motherboard and power supply? Or am I just talking stupid?

have you thought of a Beowulf system?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)

[Killer42]

I've also had a little experience working with fairly large numbers. I once calculated 256 to the power of 65,536. Don't remember the answer off-hand, but I recall it was around 157,000 digits long.

[Motoma]

What method are you using to determine primes?

[Banfa]

Forgetting about that option, would it be possible to have two or more desktops running together and sharing workload? Or even one sort of main computer with all the bells and whistles, linked with several units that are pretty much just a motherboard and power supply? Or am I just talking stupid?

Yes, in fact there are universities in USA that have create supper computers out of large arrays of Macs (several 100I believe). The 2 main problems to over come are

1. Cooling, that many PCs in a room produce a lot of heat and they need to be kept within operational temperature ranges.
2. Writing the controlling software that assigns jobs to the available processors

Other examples include those screen savers from SETI (and other places) that use your PCs computing power when it is not being used by yourself, that is a form of distributed processing with computers being assigned jobs from a central controlling computer and then reporting back when they have finished.

However there is a 3rd problem as far as calculating prime numbers is concerned, from the wikipedia site

The software must be re-written to take advantage of the cluster, and specifically have multiple non-dependent parallel computations involved in its execution.

So you would need to re-write your software (no surprises there) but it needs to have "multiple non-dependent parallel computations", this works in SETI where every processor runs the same algorithms of different pieces of data but in the search for prime numbers I am not sure that the same condition necessarily holds true.

[horace1]

various researchers have investigated using Beowulf clusters for finding primes
http://ploug.eu.org/doc/l-beow.pdf
http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2002-September/008048.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/550037.html